Curry will start NBA AllStar Game for seventh time.
Even if you weren’t watching it live, by now you have probably heard about Stephen Curry’s 62point virtuoso performance against Portland last month.
Part of the buzz involved Curry’s sheer mastery in the game, and part was created by the emphatic and almost crazed description of the final shot from Bob Fitzgerald, the Warriors’ TV playbyplay announcer.
As Curry drilled the transition wing 3pointer that capped his showcase and airplaned back down the court, Fitzgerald squealed: “He got it. Sixtytwo!”
The call has been used on a series of NBC Sports Bay Area promotions and countless memes during the past month, and the odd thing is: This scenario might have never happened in another season.
“Many times, for a broadcaster or a playbyplay guy, Steph will hit a 3, and your best move is to shut up,” Fitzgerald said. “You let the fan crescendo tell the story. But you don’t have that now. You don’t have the extra part of the orchestra.”
Fitzgerald barely said a word with a soldout Oracle Arena standing in near silence around him when Klay Thompson was making the recordsetting free throws during his 37point third quarter in 2015.
He was quiet for nearly six seconds when Curry drained a remarkable 13th 3pointer against New Orleans two seasons later.
But Fitzgerald “punched it” during Curry’s 62point game. He’s done that a number of times this season as he and other broadcasters try to navigate a global pandemic that has them calling games without fan reaction to augment the moment in the arena or, as frequently, from offsite locations.
As the Warriors prepare to play six of their next seven games on the road, starting Friday in Orlando, the TV and radio teams won’t be traveling with the squad. Instead, they’ll be trying to depict the games from San Francisco, a scenario that has even the most experienced broadcasters scrambling.
“Forget basketball for a second. It’s very unsettling. You’re a little unsettled about yourself and your place in it,” said Tim Roye, the Warriors’ radio playbyplay announcer. “As a dad, I worry about my kids all the time, but my grandparents lived through the Spanish flu. My parents lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
“You’re never going to hear me complain about this.”
Roye starts out most every day by grabbing a coffee and walking his dog. Sometimes during those walks, he crosses paths with people who mention a game or a specific call.
But mostly, he goes about the business of preparing for games — overly preparing, so he knows every motion of every player, just in case the feed he’s getting isn’t quite right.
After more than two decades of being at every Warriors game, Roye is calling road games from a remote studio in San Francisco. Actually, it’s just a booth at Chase Center that includes an 18inch TV monitor with the opposing team’s TV feed and a laptop or iPad that displays uptothesecond stats.
With a background of recreating games on StratOMatic in the early 1980s, Roye consistently tells himself “dance between the stat monitor and TV screen.” He can’t always see what he wants, and there’s no telling what might be on the TV monitor.
When Kelly Oubre Jr. made a 3pointer to give him 40 points against Dallas earlier this month, the national TV broadcast was showing an unrelated graphic. Roye had to describe the shot without any replay, simply telling the listeners that Oubre had 40 points and moving on to other story lines.
Roye did this against a backdrop of a crew deepcleaning the Chase Center floor and wiping the backboards. Utah’s broadcasters recently had monster trucks in the background, and the Pistons’ broadcast team this month called a basketball game while the NHL’s Red Wings played hockey in front of them.
But, it was almost seamless when Roye did it, and this might become the norm. Or, at least part of the norm.
Orlando has dropped its radio team and started a simulcast. Even the Warriors, who are putting up dominant TV ratings, could consider limiting future travel.
Through 28 regularseason games, NBC Sports Bay Area rating was 6.41, up 104% from the same point last season. When including national TV games on ABC, ESPN and TNT, the rating is 7.52.
The Warriors are one of the few teams whose local broadcast ratings regularly beat national TV’s. On Wednesday, NBC Sports Bay Area viewership of the Warriors’ overtime win topped that of ESPN in the Bay Area by a nearly 5to1 ratio.
When the Warriors play the Lakers on Feb. 28, there won’t be the usual three TV trucks at Staples Center. There will be one TV truck providing a main feed and dedicated handheld cameras for the local broadcasts of the Lakers and Warriors.
Fitzgerald, who calls road games from either the NBC Sports Bay Area studio or Chase Center, considers himself a “preparation freak.” He’s done 58 Zoom calls for seasonticket holders or sponsors this season, a process that helps him replace plane and bus rides in establishing relationships with players.
He went into the Orlando bubble to call the playoffs last season and plans to travel to Tokyo to be the lead announcer for men’s and women’s basketball in the Olympics.
Still, he concedes that the future might include skipping some trips as technology improves and arenas try to shoehorn broadcasters into upper tiers of arenas that don’t allow them to properly describe the action.
“The way the world is, and considering what real people are dealing with, this is nothing,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re talking about sports. I’m happy the leagues are playing. If we can provide two hours of diversion for people, that’s the job.
“Maybe even two minutes of diversion.”
If you’re describing a 62point performance, sometimes two seconds can be enough to do the job.